Election monitor faces jail term

The head of an election-monitoring organisation in Azerbaijan has been arrested, throwing the spotlight again onto the democratic credentials of one of the European Union’s major emerging energy partners.

Anar Mammadli, who faces five years in jail, is a former member of the steering committee of the European Commission-financed Civil Society Forum, one of the major forums created by the EU when it established its Eastern Partnership with post-Soviet neighbours in 2009.

Krzysztof Bobinski, the organisation’s co-chairman, said that one charge relates to international grants given to Mammadli’s Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre to monitor the presidential election in October.

Janez Lenarcic, the director of the election-monitoring wing of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), described Mammadli’s arrest as “disturbing as it endangers citizen election observation”.

Mammadli was detained on Monday (16 December), a day before Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for energy, visited Baku to attend the signing of a deal that should see Azeri gas piped to Italy from 2019.

The Commission and the EU’s diplomatic service say they are “very concerned” about the case.

The OSCE’s monitors criticised the election as flawed at every stage. The European Parliament’s official observers described the election as “free, fair and transparent”. The Parliament subsequently distanced itself from its own observers.